My students have paid £9,000 and now they think they own me

This is definitely a consequence of charging ridiculous tuition prices. £9,000 is not much compared with US tuition prices, either. Students have become customers, and I think it's absolutely driving grade inflation. If I were paying $30,000+ per year for tuition, I also would feel like a customer. It's a natural reaction and a highly negative outcome for academia, where rigor and curiosity should be main drivers instead of A's-for-pays.

Anecdata from a professor I know: Students' parents also feel like customers, because they are often the ones paying the tuition. So they call the university and complain if their child gets a sub-par grade, citing the cost of tuition. Bad incentives all round.

MOOCs as they evolve will be part of the answer and probably could replace large lectures in a pre-college period before students get on campus. Maybe college should be shorter (2-3 years) and focus on small-group seminars that build on what students learned on their own via MOOCs. It could help lower costs to more reasonable levels. Of course universities will fight this tooth and nail because loss of revenue.

While the use of MOOCs to replace large lectures and focus on one-on-one and few-to-few interaction is eminently logical, this is something that's arguably been an option since the widespread availability of VCRs.

I'm not quite ready to pronounce the death of MOOCs in the transform college education as opposed to a new form of vocational training yet but IMO we're pretty close. Whatever impact they've had on overachievers who may or may not have had access to traditional higher education, they have failed to broadly change education in any way and the major VC-funded examples haven't succeeded financially.

If the school system was not that crippled they should have already known it in depth.

tl;dr: professor has a few bad experiences with students and, combining them with a choice anecdote from an unnamed colleague, proceeds to generalize to not only the (presumably) hundreds of students he has taught, but students, everywhere, in general.

Having been a student myself, I could recount the time when a professor chose to replace her all twelve of her lectures with student presentations, then tested us on entirely untaught content; or perhaps the other time when submitted assignments and tests were not marked or discussed, at all, so that the only feedback was a numerical result at the end of the semester.

I could choose to say that this is symptomatic of a system where research is king and teaching is for peons and undergraduates are lower than dirt.

Or I could choose to say that perhaps some professors are just bad at their jobs. Or, even, they just had a bad semester. The advantage is that I could do this without cherry-picking the outliers.

What did the writer teach? I hope it is not statistics.

edit: that's some fast negative karma there. Those of you that downvoted, I would love to hear your thoughts.

I am not paying for a "chance to learn". I am paying for a self-professed expert in pedagogy, whose has spend devoted their proffesional life to the art of shoving information into arbitrary people's heads. I go to the doctor because I want a professional with knowledge of diseases to fix my cold, not the crystal homeopathic healer that lurks on the street outside my apartment. Teachers are supposed to be experts at matching students with explainations of concepts.

If I just wanted a chance to learn, then I could go to the public library. However there are many explainations of the same concept, so in the interest of not wasting my time during the most productive decade of my life, I go see a proffesional to explain things to me.

If teachers cannot be bothered to perform their sole function, then I will take my money elsewhere.

[edit] The attitude of teachers astounds me

> Moreover, when I was studying would I have ever had the balls to contact my lecturers and not only question their ability to grade my work appropriately but imply that my low grade was their fault?

Of course it is the teacher's fault. Examine the facts:

1) The student did not understand the material at the beginnng of the term otherwise the student would not be there in the first place

2) The student then sought to correct this defficiency in their education by contracting a proffesional.

3) The teacher fails to significantly improve the student's understanding, despite many weeks of interaction with student (student fails exam)

4) Teacher blames student for failing to grasp their perfect explaination that works perfectly well for themselves.

The cognitive dissonance is astounding. And teachers wonder why society is only willing to pay them so little?